


Hell is Other People

by foolishgames



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 21:56:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolishgames/pseuds/foolishgames
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's year is up.  Down he goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hell is Other People

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to livejournal December 2007

They torture him first.

He’s strapped to a table, smooth and flat and hot underneath him, blistering his shoulders and ass and calves, burning the hair at the back of his head. There are implements strapped to the walls around him, hundreds of them, and they are taken down and used on him, one after another, and put away dripping with his blood.

A demon with his mother’s face breaks his fingers, one by one, then takes a paring knife and removes the soles of his feet like she’s taking the skin off an orange. A different demon makes a small hole and paces out the length of his intestines on the floor, stomping all over them with cloven feet.

They burn him with hot pokers, every inch of flesh, until his vision is obscured by smoke and all he can smell is cooking meat.

He screams for a long time.

When he stops screaming and takes whatever they give him without protest, they let him up from the table.

The demon who wears his mother’s face leads him to another room.

He know the girl there, remembers her with the clarity of the dead. “Jenny,” he says, and his voice is hoarse. Senior year of high school. She’d been a cheerleader.

She looks at him blankly. “You said you loved me.”

He had. After she had killed herself, he’d sworn never to use that line to get a girl into bed again. He never had. “I’m sorry.”

She holds out her hands. She’s holding a baby, carelessly, a foetus no bigger than his fist. “You said you loved me. I thought you would take care of us.”

“I’m sorry,” he tries to say again, but what comes out is, “I lied.”

She turns away, and is replaced. Another face, another failure. The consequences of his actions are laid out before him one after another. Accusing faces, broken trust. People hurt by his selfishness, his carelessness, his laziness. He sees some faces he knows of people who are still alive, some he’s sure would never end up in Hell, but they blur together and he knows it doesn’t matter.

At last, there’s his father. His mother – the demon who looks like her – stands by his side and they both regard him coldly as he shrivels.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

“That doesn’t count,” says the demon. “Not here.”

A little girl takes him by the hand and leads him away to a dark room. They leave him there.

When he can’t remember the shape his own hands make in the air, they come for him again.

His mother – no, the demon with the pale hair and sweet face - leads him through many different rooms. “Everybody chooses to come here, honey,” she says. “Every soul here is offered the chance to go elsewhere, but they so rarely do. People will sell everything they have, will fight and cheat and starve and go without to get here.” She brushes back the hair of a man whose eyes are being eaten by scarab beetles. “We’re doing them a favour.” She presses her fingers, with their polished, smooth nails, into his empty, bleeding sockets. “It’s what they want.” The man screams, and thrashes, straining against the bindings holding him down.

Mary flicks a beetle off her wrist. “Do you understand?”

He doesn’t, not really. “Yes,” he says.

He presses down on the man’s bleeding skin. Disoriented, he thinks maybe he’s trying to stem the blood loss, but his fingers curl and scratch and tear and he watches himself do more damage.

“They deserve it, honey,” says his mother. “You’re doing good.”

He understands now why they took so long to take his skin off, when it was him on the table. Flaying somebody is painstaking, exacting work. If he misses a bit, or does it wrong, he has to go back and do it again.

When the man’s skin is lying in shreds around him and the blood has begun to cool, the screaming finally stops. He pokes experimentally at an exposed nerve, and the guy twitches, but doesn’t even whimper.

He reaches up and unties him. “You can get up now.”

The man is taken away. His mother smiles. “You did that to him. You ripped his skin off and tortured him.”

“You made me,” he says.

She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

She takes him to another place and pushes his face into boiling water until the meat drops away from his cheeks and his lungs are steaming. “You wanted to be here, Dean. You wanted this.”

She takes him to a still, quiet room where the bodies of a thousand children rot and leaves him there. He breathes the stench of decay and tries not to look at the things moving in the corpse heaps.

They take him back to the torture room after that, laying him face down and taking the skin of his back and legs in careful strips. He doesn’t scream until they grab his head and lift him up so he can see.

“You know how long you’ve been down here, Dean?” his mother-the-demon asks. She pokes at Sam, hanging limp from the wall, hair in his eyes. “Long enough for Sam to get brave and stupid, looking for you. He never married, you know. Never went back to school or got a life. Spent years trying to get you back, and landed himself a place right here beside you instead.” She grabs Sam’s hair and yanks him up, pulling his head back and exposing his throat. “Aren’t you happy to see your brother, Sammy?”

“Fuck you,” Sam snarls, and gurgles as she draws a blade across his throat.

Somebody nails Dean’s head in place so he can’t look away. For the first time in a long time, he screams, as they take down all of the very interesting implements from the walls and use them on his brother, one after another.

It takes a long time.

When they’re finished, they leave him alone with Sam and the sound of dripping blood.

Sam lifts his head and stares at Dean. “This is your fault.”

Dean can’t look away. “I’m sorry.”

“Like that means anything here,” Sam spits. “You did this to me.”

Dean looks at him, bleeding and angry and blaming. “I didn’t want his.”

“Yeah, you did,” Sam scoffs. “This is us, Dean. I can never leave you now. Together forever. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Their mother comes back then, pats Sam on the cheek fondly. She releases Dean from the table and puts a knife in his hand. “Go on, Dean. You know how.”

He fights her desperately, every step of the way, even as the blade slices in and the screaming starts. She won’t let him stop, makes him split Sam open and lay his organs out in patterns on the floor, makes him cut off Sam’s long, clever fingers and feed them to him, makes him hurt his brother over and over.

“I hate you,” says Sam in a thin, exhausted voice. “I hate you.”

“I know,” says Dean, staring at the blood pooling on the floor.

They take Sam away after that, and his mother sits and smiles as somebody with a vice breaks all his bones.

They push pins through his eyes to keep them open and make him watch as they dismantle a screaming girl, ten or eleven years old. Tie each of her limbs to a rack and turn the handle, and she pops apart as her arms and legs go flying.

“This is what you wanted, Dean,” his mother says. “You signed up for this. You don’t get to tell us no.”

She brings him to a new place now. No more tiny, hot rooms with bloodstained walls and the sound of screams. They climb up, and up, until they emerge on a bluff overlooking a wide, red plain. Dean looks down into the seething mass of demons and condemned souls and realises he can’t even tell which is which.

Hot winds blows against him, stinging his many wounds, buffeting him. He wonders what would happen if he surrendered to it and fell.

“You’re never leaving,” his mother says in her clear, quiet voice. “This is it, Dean. Just give in to it.”

“I think,” says a new voice, “That will be quite enough.”

Dean turns to see Sam standing there. Not the broken, bleeding, hurting Sam the demons had dragged away, with his accusing eyes and hollow voice. This Sam is just standing there, with his hands in the pockets a familiar leather jacket, looking tired.

His mother hisses furiously. “You can’t be here.”

Sam raises an eyebrow. “I chose to come. That’s allowed.”

Dean stares. “Sammy?”

Sam smiles then, and something rushes over Dean, something cool and sweet and – happy. He’d forgotten how it felt to see Sam smile. “Hey, Dean. You wanna get out here?” Casually, as if they’re just going to link arms and stroll away, out of Hell, out of death. It’s almost funny, and Dean’s mouth twitches before he remembers.

“I can’t. I have to stay here.”

His mother touches his hair, makes an approving noise. “That’s right, sweetheart. You’ve been bad, and now you have to be punished.”

“Wrong.” Sam’s voice is like the crack of the whip. “He made a deal; that’s why he’s here. Remember, Dean?”

Dean nods. “I chose to come here.” He did. That’s why he can’t get out: he walked into this with his eyes open.

“And you can choose,” Sam says with slow, deliberate care, “to leave.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” snarls his mother, only it’s not his mother, is it? It’s a demon that looks like her, and the illusion is starting to crack. “You can’t just un-make your choices.”

Sam smirks. “You can’t.” He points to Dean, and them back at himself. “We can. We’re not like you.”

The demon, who is looking less and less like his mother with every second, goes still. “You dare.”

“We’re different. We’re better. We can make choices and then make different ones. You hate us because you made one bad choice at the beginning and now you’re stuck with it, and you lie to us to keep us from realising we’re different.” Sam spreads his arms. “So many people choose to come here, yes. But we can choose to leave, as well.”

“You can’t.” The demon looks nothing like his mother now, a pale, genderless, emaciated figure that’s both lovely and terrifying. “You can’t leave. You deserve to be here.” It grabs at Dean, sinking claws into his cheek to pull his head around. “You wanted this, Dean. You begged for it. You can’t leave.”

“I deserve to be here,” he repeats dully. “I wanted this.” The ground is burning his feet.

“Why?” says Sam. “What have you ever done that’s so terrible that you deserve this?” His gesture encompasses everything, the demons, the torture, the massed crowds on the plain beneath. Dean realises that the shrieking and howling has stopped, the wind has died down, and every being in Hell is silent, listening.

“I tortured you,” he says. “I took a knife and cut you up and burned you and broke you.”

Sam frowns. “It wasn’t me. It was just pretend.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.” He looks at his hands, twisted and broken. “I thought it was. I meant to hurt you.”

“Are you sorry?” Sam steps forward then, coming close enough that Dean can see his feet. Worn out boots. It’s more real and solid and strange than anything he’s seen in a long time. “Tell me you’re sorry, Dean.”

“Sorry doesn’t matter here,” he whispers.

“Are you kidding?” says Sam, and his voice is so soft and intimate. “Sorry matters more here than anywhere else. It’s the most powerful thing in this stupid place.”

Dean lifts his head and looks at his brother. Sam’s eyes are intense and careful. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for everything. For all my stupid mistakes. For not being a better brother and son and hunter. I’m sorry for hurting you and not listening to you and abandoning you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Sam reaches out and puts his arms around Dean, pulling him close. He holds him there for a long time, and his touch doesn’t burn or break or hurt at all. “I forgive you,” he says into Dean’s ear. “Everything. I forgive you.”

Cool air rushes over them, and when Dean looks up, everything has faded away. They stand in a formless, grey space, and Sam is smiling, and nothing hurts.

“You can’t do this,” hisses the demon, the only one to have followed them.

Sam shrugs. “We already have.” He takes Dean’s hand and turns away.

“How?” The demon doesn’t sound so angry anymore, only plaintive and bewildered.

“Because you tell one truth and a lot of lies. People choose to go to hell. They choose paths that take them there. But free will doesn’t end after death. We can still choose redemption.”

“Nobody ever has,” says the demon.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t,” says Sam, and turns away to lead Dean into the darkness.

They walk for a long time in the formless space, hand-in-hand.

“Sam?” says Dean at last. “Did you really come to Hell to get me?”

“Yep,” says Sam, sounding satisfied and exhausted. “Like I would let you stay there.”

“Oh.” Dean thinks about this as they walk. “Where are we going now?”

Sam tugs his hand gently. “We’re going home, Dean.”

When Dean wakes up, he’s lying in a warm, comfortable bed in a sunlit room. He turns his head (It doesn’t hurt, it’s not bolted down, nothing hurts) and Sam is curled up beside him, head on the same pillow, deeply asleep. His face is more lined than Dean remembers, and his hair is threaded with grey, and even in sleep, he looks tired. He’s the most beautiful thing Dean’s ever seen.

Satisfied, Dean lets his eyes drift closed again. He’s home.


End file.
